


The Damned Don't Cry!

by took_skye



Series: Living For the Night [16]
Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Alternate Universe - Noir, Children, Gen, POV First Person, POV Male Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-25
Updated: 2011-01-25
Packaged: 2017-10-22 20:24:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/242227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/took_skye/pseuds/took_skye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Former cop Jason Gideon sees hope for everyone, even 10-year-old budding-killers, but can he help Lil Foyet see hope for herself?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Damned Don't Cry!

  
_"Indifference, if let alone, will produce obduracy; and obduracy, if let alone, will produce torment." ~ Henry Melvill_

***///***

She pushes open the door to _Nightingale’s_ on a brisk sunny Monday morning. The perfect image of innocence, a petite pixie in a schoolgirl’s uniform with pink backpack and pigtails. No more than ten; one would expect her to be at a desk learning her multiples or out running the blacktop with the other little boys and girls. Instead she’s here, at my bar, climbing her way onto a stool in front of me. Her eyes stab for my attention and hit their mark before the first blink. “You Mr. Gideon?”

“I am Jason Gideon,” I confirm for her with a gentle smile. “Who are you?”

“Lilith Foyet.” _Shouldn’t I know that?_ Her little lips imply in a wicked way.

“George and JJ’s daughter?”

The girl’s head bobs as she smiles wide. “Yeah, Officer Foyet’s my daddy! You know him, right?”

“He used to work for me.”

“But then you got fired, huh?” She smiles in the same manner as her father when he takes a verbal poke at someone; just a slight curl of the lips and knife-glint in the eyes.

I don’t get upset or angry though, I simply answer honestly. “I was made to retire early.”

“Same diff.”

“Same diff,” I admit with a shrug. “So what can I help you with, Lilith?”

“Lil,” she corrects with a smile before it fades into uncertainty. “Um…” she begins to glance over now hunched shoulders at the others in the bar, ensuring they aren’t paying attention, before she leans herself on the bar towards me. “Think we can go somewhere to talk?”

“Talk?” She nods. “About?”

“Stuff.”

I let my brows arch a touch in her vagueness. “Stuff?”

The little girl give a tiny giggle. “I’m not gonna say it out loud with a buncha lowlifes listening in.”

“Would you like to talk while I walk you to school?”

“I’m not going today.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to,” she answers as if that was obvious and reason enough.

“What would your father think if he knew you weren’t in school?” I pick George over his now wife, already seeing how Lil identifies herself as his daughter, not JJ's.

Lil’s lips curl again as she relaxes back onto the stool. “What he won’t know won’t hurt him.”

“He won’t know?” I can’t yet pinpoint how her mind works; is she trusting me or telling me not to tell her father?

“Not unless you tell him.” The little girl slips herself off the barstool completely. “And, you won’t do that cause then I’ll never talk to you again and you wanna talk to me.”

“How do you figure that?”

The little girl looks up with a cutesy grin. “Cause I’m awesome.”

“Oh…well…” I raise a hand as if indicating my own lapse in knowledge as I smile. “How about we just go for that walk then?”

“Sure!” Lil heads out ahead of me as I put one of the spare bartenders in charge while I'm gone. She’s waiting for me just outside the door. “My daddy says you’re smart.”

“That’s very kind of him.” There’s another shoe to fall on that one.

“And that you’re a sap.” And there it is. The girl giggles dismissively. “But he says that ‘bout lots of folks.”

“I’ll bet.” I let out a laugh myself before starting to walk towards the park. Maybe this girl has no interest in such things, things other children enjoy, but I’d prefer to speak to her in a place that might bring out that vulnerability in her wherever it might be hiding.

The girl skips and hops about me as if just walking would be too boring to bare. She doesn’t say anything though. Lil seems to go mute, stuck somewhere in her head as she keeps her body busy. It’s at block three she finally speaks. “Do you get other people?”

“How do you mean, Lil?”

She stops the playful moves and settles up to walk beside me. “Just…do you get them? I don’t get them.”

I’m still stuck on the vagueness of a ten-year-old so try to guide her some. “Can you tell me a time when you didn’t get others?”

“Like when the class bunny, Peter, died. Everyone was crying, even the teacher, and…well…” she shrugs. “I don’t know why. We can get a new bunny.”

“It’s not the loss of the bunny that upsets them, Lil, it’s the loss of Peter.”

The girl gives me a look like I’ve just spoken Greek too her. I break it down more.

“They all cared for Peter as they would a classmate. He was more than just an animal, he was a friend.”

“But…why?”

I’m starting to see the cracks in the girl, the breaks in humanity that may make her like her father. “Is this why you came to see me, Lil? To understand why the other kids aren’t like you?”

She nods her head, ashamed of something, as we finally cross into one of the few parks left in the city. It’s made of steel, rusted with cracked paint clinging to monkey-bars and slides, and its foundation is set in concrete. It is meant to appear as a child’s playtime paradise, but something is lost in its structure…it suits for a talk with a little girl like Lil Foyet.

“Daddy says it’s cause I’m not weak like they are,” the words slip out in a soft confession, “but I don’t know.”

“If it’s true?” I offer.

Her head stays bowed as she wanders off to a set of red plastic swings leaving me to follow. She drops the pink backpack in the gravel and settles into a soft, low, swinging action. "Yeah."

I take a seat on the blue plastic seat beside her, letting the swing move under my weight but giving it no real encouragement to continue. “Well, do you think it’s true, Lil?”

“I’m not sure. They cry way more and that doesn’t seem like a good thing but…”

“But…?”

“They laugh more too. They laugh at, like, everything.”

“You’d like to be able to do that, Lil? Feel those things more like the other children?”

The young girl nods some before quickly looking up and adding. “Not the bad ones though.”

“Bad ones?” As terrible an experience some emotions are I can’t see any as truly bad. Each one brings another experience of one's own humanity.

“I don’t wanna be crying or scared all the time.”

A smile creeps up over my face, then melds into a smirk. “I can’t blame you.” I couldn’t see George being very sympathetic to a girl who is frightened and crying…not being able to feel emotions that might make her vulnerable to him may be a good thing. “But sometimes even feeling the bad things can be nice.”

The girl pumps her legs when her swing starts to stall and looks over at me. “Like when?”

“Like with Peter, the rabbit.” I shift some to watch her as she sways back and forth. “Think about what it might’ve been like if you felt the same way as the other students and teacher had about losing him.”

Her legs stop moving. I have her fascination.

“Crying isn’t a bad thing, Lil. If you cry because you lose someone, or something, it means you cared about them. You loved them.”

“I love my daddy.” She announces, giving another stretch-and-bend of her legs. “And he loves me.”

“What do you think that means?”

“Huh?” The legs go still.

“To love someone. What do you think it means, Lil?”

I’m not looking for a real answer. A real person can’t give one, but a child will try and someone like Foyet will give the definition or a series of mixed clichés. I want to see what answer she'll give.

The girl shifts to stop her swing completely. “Don’t know.”

“There’s no wrong answer, Lil.” I assure her with a gentle smile.

“It means,” she shrugs again, uses a single foot planted on the ground to move the swing about, “you like the person a lot and wanna hang with them and, uh…that they’re like you.”

“Like you?”

“Yeah, like me and Daddy are.”

“And what about your mother and brother, Henry? Are they like you?”

“No.”

“Do you love them?”

“Um…” another shrug.

“Well do you think you should?”

“Yes.” Lil moves to straddle the swing and look straight at me. Her eyes are still dark like Foyet’s, but I see a tiny light in there. It needs attention, devotion, or it’ll be snuffed out in a matter of months, but it’s there.

“Why?”

“The other kids love their mommies and brothers and sisters. Mommy tells me she loves me all the time. I think it’s, um, ‘posed to be normal…loving your family.” She looks down at her feet. “But then Daddy says that it’s not smart cause, um, caring too much makes you weak. I just…” She looks back up. “It doesn’t make sense, Mr. Gideon, cause he says he cares for me more than anything but then says that caring too much makes you weak so…doesn’t that make Daddy weak?”

I have to twist my mouth some to prevent the smile. I wonder if George knows that his daughter’s already spotted the major flaw in his emotional logic? That being said, I stay safe just in case she decides to share this chat with her dad later. “Maybe he’s just trying to figure things out like you are?”

“Maybe he’s full of it?”

“That’s for you to decide, Lil, not me. But I’d like to help you feel more if you want to.”

The pixie in pigtails grins. “Really? How?”

“Well, tell about the times you do feel. What you feel? How long do you feel it?”

“No.” Lil gets up from the swing suddenly, nearly tripping over it in the process. “You'll tell on me and I'll get in trouble.”

“I won't do that, Lil, I promise.”

“You will!” She insists, grabbing up her bag and throwing it back on.

My curiosity rushes to concern as the previously constantly composed girl seems to suddenly panic. I stand and raise my hands in protest at her attempts to leave. “Lil, please stay. I won't tell anyone what we talk about no matter what it is.”

She turns on me with a near furious growl. “You wanna know what makes me feel?” Her eyes have gone the hollow black of Foyet’s, the light of hope gone. “Killing Peter the rabbit made me feel! Just like with the neighbors’ cats and the stray dogs and it’s exciting and scary and makes my heart go real fast like when you ride a roller coaster, and…and…” she grows so frustrated she starts to hold her breath and shake. The light comes back to the center of her eyes, but it’s under water now. Then she drops.

Plops right on the ground like a toddler might in a fit as the water in her eyes releases over her face.

I settle back onto the blue swing, lean forward with my arms on my lap. “How long does it last, Lil?” I keep my voice soft, like I would’ve for any child while working on the force.

“Awhile,” the girl shrugs, “but then I start to forget and my feelings fade away again.”

“You’re crying.” I point out only to see what she thinks, or feels, about the act.

“I’m frustrated.”

“That’s a feeling.”

“I guess.”

“Well if you can feel frustrated enough to cry then maybe you can feel happy enough to laugh, too?”

“Maybe.”

I can see I may have hit an emotional wall with her for the moment. She’s drained herself into pure apathy. “I think you should go finish up the day at school, Lil. Your parents will be worried if they get a call that you didn’t show up. If you’d like I can walk you there.”

Lil’s angelic face looks up, the light in her eyes just a dull flicker as she shrugs. “Okay.”

I go to stand up slowly even as the girl stays put seemingly unwilling to get up on her own. She doesn’t even bother to try until I give her my hand.

“I want you to know you can come to talk to me anytime you’d like, Lil.”

“Okay.”

“And you can tell me anything.”

“And you won’t tell?”

Surprisingly she keeps her hand in mine even as we exit the park. It's not a lot, but it's something. It's hope.

"And I won't tell."

“Thank you, Mr. Gideon.”

***///***

 _"He who has never hoped can never despair." ~ George Bernard Shaw, The Devil's Dictionary_


End file.
